Spain underwent drastic social and political changes in the last decades of the twentieth century which also affected the nation’s patterns of emigration. Contemporary Spanish literature and film that portray these decades reflect the country’s fluctuating characteristics of migration. ¡Vente a Alemania, Pepe! (1971) by Pedro Lazaga, Coto vedado (1985) by Juan Goytisolo, El hijo del acordeonista (2003) by Bernardo Atxaga, and Yoyes (2000) by Helena Taberna demonstrate Spain’s migration trends during the last years of Franco’s dictatorship and the transition to democracy. The nation’s highly increased socioeconomic development in the 1970s and 1980s which eventually led to a first-world status also affected emigration, which can be seen in Carlota Fainberg (1999) by Antonio Muñoz Molina, Kasbah (2000) by Mariano Barroso, Restos de carmine (1999) by Juan Madrid, and Map of the Sounds of Tokyo (2009) by Isabel Coixet.

The Master's thesis "ETA in Spanish Fiction Movies: Product or Creator of Spanish Collective Memory?" focuses on the interrelationship between history, cinematic representations and the way individuals perceive the traumatic past of Spanish history related to the Basque separatist organization ETA. Althought in the recent years there has been a proliferation of literature on collective memory, the approach, which this research follows, fills the gap by combining the macro-level (public) and micro-level (personal) of collective memory. Using the dynamics memory perspective, a theoretical framework that has grown popular within the multidisciplinary territories of collective memory scholarship, the thesis analyses four movies dealing with the ETA subject. These works allow us reflect on how the Basque separatist organization is portrayed in Spanish cinema and how this image has changed through time. To complement the investigation at the macrolevel, semi-structured interviews with 14 participants were conducted, searching for answers how cinematic representations influence people's perception of ETA and its actions. In both cases, thematic analysis was employed as a technique of data analysis